The present invention relates generally to the field of networked storage systems, and more particularly to virtual failure domains for networked storage systems.
A networked storage system is a batch of servers that are interconnected by a network (e.g., Ethernet, fiber channel, wide area network (WAN), local area network (LAN), wired or wireless, or any combination of) using a variety of connectivity protocols or media. The network connecting the storage system may be flat or hierarchical in design and the batch of servers may be physically ordered in the same computer rack, or distributed between different racks at different locations. The power supply of the storage system may include one or multiple power supply units per server, or use the same power supply for multiple servers.
Each server in a networked storage system may be connected to a single or multiple storage devices that can be represented by hard disk drives (HDD), solid-state drives (SSD), Flash Card or any other media that can be used for persistent (or non-persistent) storage of data. Storage devices can be connected directly or over just a bunch of disks (JBOD), and the connection protocols can be fiber channel, small computer system interface (SCSI), serial attached SCSI (SAS), serial AT attachment (SATA), integrated drive electronics (IDE), internet-SCSI (iSCSI), peripheral component interconnect (PCI), PCI express (PCIe), redundant array of independent disks (RAID), or any other protocols or media currently existing or to be developed in the future.
In computer networking, a failure domain encompasses a section of a network that is negatively affected when a critical device or network service experiences problems. The size of a failure domain and its potential impact depends on the device or service that is malfunctioning. For example, a router potentially experiencing problems would generally create a more significant failure domain than a network switch would. Smaller failure domains reduce the risk of disruption over a large section of a network, and ease the troubleshooting process.